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As a board member for the Ohio Humanities Council, I’m often reminded that conversation is integral and crucial to the humanities; yet many would not consider how to use technology to foster conversation a humanities initiative.

Inspired by the UMWBlogs and other university WordPress multisite platforms, a colleague and I embarked on a mission to create a blogging or digital commons platform at our university. The university had not upgraded to a content management system and so faculty and students had the option to either create their own web pages on their university accounts or to go outside the university to Facebook, WordPress and other social media/blogging platforms. The university uses a central IT model that encourages new online resources to be approved and supported by the Computing and Technology Services (CATS) and often by Communications and Marketing and/or the Center for Teaching and Learning. These partners gradually warmed to the idea of university blogs or a digital commons and we launched into what has become a two and a half year process of discussions, trials, and beta tests. In the past year, the university decided to adopt Drupal as the CMS for the university’s web presence. We became aware of Drupal’s Digital Commons platform as we were discussing the CMS last summer and we have tentatively adopted it for a collaboration oriented social media platform and WordPress as a resource for courses that may be expanded to replace the individual html web pages. My goal was to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations by making the research, learning, and creativity within the university visible both to ourselves and to potential partners outside the university—the new CMS may go along way to heighten the visibility of university research and resources and the digital commons (soon to branded with a new name) will provide space for formal and informal groups within the university. It will also replace faculty and staff listservs. Blogs/Learning will provide a public facing, collaborative, constructivist platform for courses outside Desire2Learn. Blogs/Community may eventually knit together the formerly isolated and somewhat random individual and project sites around the university. The university libraries also participate in the Ohio Link digital repository initiative with our WSU CORE. Each approach has it limits and some worry that this is just too much.

Questions: Where in all of this does collaboration with those outside the university take place?  How do these resources related to the widespread use of Facebook by individuals and university offices? We have also looked at OpenScholar and we find there is often something new to check out before we attain final approval on any one strategy; what is the value of the long dialog, initiated by humanities faculty but now encompassing many offices and constituencies within the university?

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This session is happening! Sunday, 11:00 am – 12:15 pm, Room 92. If you’re interested, please (please please please) read and comment on the Googledocs draft session structure!!!

There are a number of ongoing projects that center around structuring, storing, sharing and visualizing data within the humanities, ranging from well-known tools such as Zotero to brand new tools stemming from recent grants that are still being prototyped. These efforts create lots of opportunities, and sharing data between these tools and initiatives benefits the whole DH community. However, designing for and implementing data structures that support this kind of sharing adds a different kind of complexity.

The question is, then, how do think about structuring, organizing, and sharing our data going forward so that our structures are both flexible enough to hook into when we build new tools but structured enough that the data sets would talk to each other? How do we tie together different kinds of data sets (for example, but not limited to: GIS, citation management, prosopography, timeline and event tracking, etc.) in a way that works across several disciplines? How do we structure the data so it integrates well with visualization tools? What are the benefits, costs, and challenges of an undertaking of this kind?

If we break it down even further, we can ask more granular questions about the data we collect when we do research. What kinds of data sets do you have? What kinds of data show up in those sets? What kinds of relationships do you want to analyze between those different kinds of data? How do these questions change (or stay the same) across disciplines?

While it’s not easy to answer questions of this scope in a single session, THATCamp’s unconference format seems like the ideal place to start!

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Yesterday, Dan Cohen tweeted a comment about all the places where THATCamps are springing up, causing me to once again look over the list of past and upcoming THATCamps–almost 50 in total.  It really has become a world-wide phenomenon.

All of which caused me to tweet:

Given the global nature of #THATCamp, it’d be cool to design a project to which each thatcamp can contribute a piece over time.

To which @thatcamp replied:

@ericdmj You are SO right. So much is possible. Could be a #THATCamp proposal, even, such a project.

So, being a good follower of instruction, this I now do.

That said, I have no firm suggestions.  But to start the gears turning: what hacking/programming-focused project could we do that would allow asynchronous contributions over long spans of time by people who are, more than likely, only dedicating a single session at any given THATCamp thereto?

An hour here, an hour there, here in Paris, there in Canberra, there in New England. . . . What could we build across time and space?

Any and all thoughts welcome!

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According to Urban Dictionary (most credible source EVER!), the phrase “speak truth to power” means:

A phrase coined by the Quakers during in the mid-1950s. It was a call for the United States to stand firm against fascism and other forms of totalitarianism; it is a phrase that seems to unnerve political right, with reason.

or

A vacuous phrase used by some on the political Left, especially the denizens of the Democratic Underground website. Ostensibly, it means to verbally confront or challenge conservative politicians and conservative ideals using the overwhelmingly logical and moral arguments of liberalism. Doing so would, naturally of course, devastate the target individual, leaving them a stuttering, stammering bowl of defeated jelly. That or cause them to experience an epiphany that would have such a profound, worldview-changing effect that they would immediately go out and buy a Che t-shirt and start reading Noam Chomsky. Unfortunately, the individuals who would use this phrase have little or no understanding of either liberalism or conservatism, and the “truth” that they speak consists mainly of epithets and talking points, memorized by rote, which they learned from other, equally vapid liberals. As such “speak truth to power” joins other feel-good but ultimately meaningless gems from Leftist history such as “right on”, “up against the wall”. “question everything” and the ever-popular “fuck you, pig”.

(Well, OK, then…)

Seeking out slightly more credible sources for the origin of the phrase leads one to a Quaker pamphlet from the 1950s. As a “trained” political scientist, I think of Aaron Wildavsky’s book and, more recently, a book by Manning Marable. Across these sources, I believe the phrase is about questioning reasoning of “the state;” it’s about bringing information (maybe evidence?) to the table with those who are in formal positions of power who may not want to “hear” it.

I suspect other THATCamp attendees find themselves in positions like those that I find myself in where I have opportunities to “speak truth to power.” I get coded as “the technology guy” and “volunteered” onto any/all task forces and/or committees (let’s call them task committees) that have any connection at all to technology. Often, those task committees are led by someone with formal decision-making authority who may or may not *really* want to hear what you say.

We all know the perils of committee work, but there are obvious advocacy opportunities presented by this work as well. So, I’m proposing a session where we share advocacy strategies. We might discuss our “tactics” within the realm of formal committee work, but even outside of it. There, the overlap with Mark Sample’s ideas around “tactical collaboration” are obvious, so perhaps we can convince Mark to grace us with his presence (and his ideas) as part of the session.

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How does the availability, writing style, and level of completeness of documentation influence our willingness to use a digital tool or to engage in a project? More important, how does it effect the core audiences for our projects?

I use the term “documentation” to refer to any set of instructional writing or media (printed and/or online instructions, user guides, podcasts, screencasts, slideshows/screenshots, et al) produced to support the use of a digital tool, process, or project.

Documentation is challenging, because it is time consuming and requires the creators of a project to share processes and details that often have become naturalized. When working closely with a project, writing clear instructions for users with different intentions, levels of technical knowledge, and commitments to digging through pages to find answers is hard. Even though it is hard, and sometimes we don’t enjoy doing it, providing good documentation is akin to creating an accessible website.

Documentation, similar to code, is a specific type of writing that often is not recognized as scholarly or substantive work. How can we elevate this type of writing to something that can be quantified or “count” for project participants who work in different professional positions?

I would like to spend some time discussing what makes good documentation and exploring the following questions:

• How much time do you spend using any type of documentation?
• How much time have you spent writing or contributing to any documentation/codex?
• If you write it, will they read it?
• Have you ever asked for user feedback about a project’s codex or user guides?
• Have you ever stopped using a tool or a project because there was not sufficient documentation to assist you?
• How does the authorial voice adopted by documentation writers influence how someone uses it? Does this matter?
• Should documentation contain multiple voices, or at least provide the opportunity for many users participate in its creation?
• Are there common elements you find lacking in most codexes?

Perhaps throughout this session, we can collaborate on a document listing suggestions/recommendations for DH project documentation.

______

Thanks everyone for a great session: docs.google.com/document/d/1jjJL75EboctzXbH0wd5sD899xRdT5TDGhx_E9U2wyj4/edit?hl=en_US

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CONTEXT: Many (most?) of you will remember the “One Week | One Tool” event hosted in 2010 by CHNM (and funded by the NEH) that resulted in Anthologize. The event was described on their site as “a unique summer institute, one that aim[ed] to teach participants how to build an open source digital tool for humanities scholarship by actually building a tool, from inception to launch, in a week.” The resulting tool, Anthologize–on which development continues–is designed to “[u]se the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book.”

For more information about Anthologize, check out Julie Meloni’s ProfHacker post on the experience as well Tom Scheinfeldt’s “Lessons from One Week | One Tool”:

• “Part I, Project Management”
• “Part 2, Use”
• “Part 3, Serendipity”

PROPOSAL: Inspired, in part, by the locally-hosted “Random Hacks of Kindness” 2011 events taking place on the same weekend as THATCampCHNM and THATCampLAC, I am proposing “One Session | One Solution.” Can we learn from the much blogged experience of those who created Anthologize to attempt something similar on a smaller scale: a high-speed hackathon taking place during an unconference? Building a tool from scratch is probably beyond the scope of one THATCamp session (or one THATCamp, for that matter). However, a smaller solution to a well-defined problem has a good chance of being found if a group of talented, motivated campers combine forces and hack something together. Even if the result is a technical plan, rather than a finished product, the days (or weeks, or months) after the face-to-face unconference could be spent collaborating on making that plan a reality.

Interested? Please leave a suggestion as to what problem (related to higher ed or the digital humanities–both broadly defined) might be productively addressed by such a session. You don’t have to have a solution already in mind, though if you do you should feel free to sketch it out here. Since the start of THATCamp is more than a week away, we have a pretty good amount of time to brainstorm possibilities and reach some consensus before we all meet face-to-face.

Thanks!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by dullhunk]

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Teacher-scholars unite! I’ve been testing some possible applications of Omeka archives and Zotero as collaborative tools organizing the development of literary research methodologies classes, and I’d like to take the wonderful opportunity of THATcamp to begin developing the structure and content of project I see as The Next Step. I’d like your help to discuss, plan, and/or block out a template for a full-class, full-term student project that works toward researching, annotating, and encoding a small number (perhaps just one per term?) of thematically-selected texts in our shamefully neglected special collections room. Ideally, this project would therefore include study of the texts themselves, research about their material and digital existences (using the ESTC, Google Books, and something like Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker)  a basic practical/theoretical framework for DH, collaboratively writing a useful and accessible overview and producing an XML version of the text. Each term or year, students and faculty would work together to select, create, and grow the entries according to a broader thematic logic that can expand over time, based on the strengths of the collections. I’d like to use this template as a basis for a grant application that would allow the project to grow and, ultimately, link faculty, students, and resources at area institutions.

I think this would be a viable model for an advanced undergraduate seminar, and it has the benefit of drawing together a variety of practical and theoretical facets of the digital humanities. Some questions to consider include how we can best design the arc of the class? What specific parts of the project would have as their goal which practical or conceptual outcomes? What are the technological hurdles to be 1.) aware of, 2.) avoided, or 3.) embraced? What should the Omeka site look like/allow, in order to help the project grow over time? How might faculty help students approach the text encoding portion of the project? What are the most useful introductory text-based sources providing a theoretical framework for such a practical project? And what might steps after The Next Step look like?